


All Parts There Made One Prisoner

by kindkit



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Community: kink_bingo, M/M, Risk Aware Consensual Kink, Tentacles, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-05
Updated: 2013-08-05
Packaged: 2017-12-22 11:57:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/912934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kindkit/pseuds/kindkit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fear won't make Thomas refuse this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All Parts There Made One Prisoner

**Author's Note:**

> This was written as a fill for the Kink Bingo prompt "tentacles."
> 
> Content note: No standard Kink Bingo content notes apply. The kink is risky in the context of the story universe but fully consensual.
> 
> I have not yet read _Broken Homes_ , the latest RoL novel, so this story might contradict Nightingale backstory included there. I've reused Desmond Tolhurst, my OMC from [Ghosts of Ettersberg](http://archiveofourown.org/works/595134), although this story can be read without having read "Ghosts." The title comes from Robert Herrick's [The Vine](http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/herrick/vine.htm), the earliest example of tentacle kink I know of (warning if you're going to read the poem: it contains rape fantasy).

There's only one thing that the pupils of Ambrose House are ever taught about sex. As fifth formers and therefore rather late for some, since at Ambrose House as at every English public school some boys discover sex unofficially, they're told never to use magic during sex. _Why_ is not fully explained, but gruesome rumours circulate among the boys about what can go wrong with spells in a situation where loss of control is almost guaranteed.

Unlike any other sexual prohibition, this one, as far as Thomas knows, is universally obeyed. Therefore he's startled in more than one way by what happens more than two decades after he listened to a red-faced headmaster announce, "For your own safety and that of the wives you will one day take, we must now discuss the marital act." He's in a hotel bed with Desmond, making love unmaritally but also, he'd assumed, unmagically. Desmond has one hand on his inner thigh and another in his hair, and there is no mundane explanation for what feels like a fingertip stroking his backside. 

"What the hell are you doing?"

"Clever, isn't it?" Desmond smiles, and something draws a squiggle on Thomas's buttock.

"Desmond, stop!" It's sharper than Thomas means to be; since 1940 he's got accustomed to giving orders. 

Desmond jerks away, putting a couple of inches of space between them. "What's the matter?"

Thomas hates the look of disappointment on Desmond's face, all the more so since this is the first time they've been alone together in almost three weeks, and Thomas is due back on duty at nine o'clock this evening. "It's dangerous. Surely you must have heard the infamous lecture at school?"

"Of course. But I don't see how it's any more bloody dangerous than anything else, right now!" Desmond's voice, too, is sharp, and he gets up onto his knees and frowns down at Thomas. 

Just as it's easy now to give orders and take orders, it's easy to quarrel. Even at the Special Research Centre, free of danger apart from stray bombs and the inevitable risks of experimental magic, fierce sudden rows break out. Friends trade vicious insults or even come to blows but are friends again within hours, usually. Thomas takes Desmond's hand, clenched halfway to a fist, and holds it. Desmond's eyes close, and slowly his hand loosens in Thomas's. "Sorry," Desmond says, sounding like the highly-strung schoolboy he must have been, not many years ago. "I oughtn't to take it out on you of all people. I only - I wanted this to be something you'd remember."

Thomas sits up and throws his arms around Desmond. It's an instinct. He would do the same thing if he heard a bomb howling towards them, and with just as much real ability to protect. For a minute or two they sit awkwardly entwined, Desmond's face pressed into Thomas's shoulder, Thomas's cheek resting on Desmond's unruly hair. "Can you tell me why?" Thomas asks finally.

"Oh, I've finally got promotion, that's all. Flight lieutenant. I'm being returned to operational duties next week."

"But the research - "

"Our section may have a breakthrough. I can't tell you about it, but, well, it needs testing in operational flight conditions."

"Does it have to be you?" Now it's Thomas who feels like a boy, simultaneously selfish and powerless.

"Darling." Desmond gives him a kiss that was meant, Thomas thinks, to be gentle, but they're both too wrought up. "There aren't many of us left."

Wizards stayed out of the last war, the one that wiped out a generation of young men. They're making up for it now. The only men dying faster, it's said, are bomber aircrews. "Operational flight conditions" surely means Desmond in a Lancaster over Germany.

Desmond was already working at the Centre when they met. There's never been an imminent possibility that he might be killed, until now. Thomas holds him closer and settles back into the bed, pulling Desmond with him. "Damn the world." It's what they say to each other when anything else would be futile. "Let's run away." 

"To the moon," Desmond says, completing the ritual. He sighs and lifts his head to smile wanly at Thomas. "I've ruined the mood, haven't I?"

"It'll be all right in a little while."

"Have we got time?"

"I think so. It's - " Thomas reaches for his watch on the tiny bedside table and nearly knocks over the lamp. "It's not quite six."

The sheets, Thomas notices as they lie together, smell of infrequent washing with insufficient soap. This is as good a hotel as is consonant with discretion, but the war creeps into everything. It's difficult, sometimes, not to feel cheapened by it all: bland repetitive food, newspapers and books curtailed by paper rationing, the furtiveness of blackout curtains, the hurry imposed by duty rosters, the fact that he's never had the chance to take Desmond to his house, his own bed, instead of a hotel. It depresses him, though he's never thought of himself as a man dependent upon luxuries. He's felt it more since he met Desmond; perhaps it's only that Desmond is the greatest stroke of luck he's ever had, and he'd like to feel that circumstances matched up to him.

"Desmond, why magic?" he asks, though he thinks he may already know the answer. "I promise you, nothing we do together has ever been forgettable."

"I suppose . . . " Desmond laughs lightly. It's what everyone tries to do now, keep cheerful and laugh at trouble. "I suppose I wanted to give you something no one else ever had. And, well, apart from two years at Cambridge I've never used magic for anything but war."

From anyone else, that would be a dirty rhetorical trick, but Desmond doesn't have the temperament for manipulation. His feelings break through sometimes, that's all. "You still want to do it, don't you?"

"Yes." Desmond leans up on an elbow and meets his eyes. His face is serious, earnest, intellectual, and that ought to be incongruous given what they're talking about, but it isn't. Desmond takes things seriously, Thomas included. "I won't hurt you. Not to brag, but my control is better than that. You won't be touching me, so there's no risk of my being distracted. In fact I won't even be touching _you_ , not directly."

It's a foolish risk, a mad risk.

They're almost five years into a war whose end is still uncertain.

Desmond will be testing an experimental weapon next week, in a frail metal tube twenty thousand feet over enemy soil.

"Yes," Thomas says. If . . . he doesn't want one of his last memories of Desmond to be refusing him.

It's frightening at first. A warm tendril of magic caresses him, generated, Thomas suspects, with a variation of the tricky _forma_ that can knock holes in concrete bunkers and tank armour. He keeps his breathing steady and calms himself by trying to work out exactly what changes Desmond must have made to it. A second tendril creeps over him, a third and fourth and fifth and sixth as he breathes shakily through his mouth, then they all go still. "Are you all right?" Desmond asks.

"I think so. Yes." He's as scared as he was during the landing at Syracuse in '43, maybe more, but he is all right. Although he doesn't want to look at what's touching him, he can't help seeing the opalescent light extending like jellyfish stingers from his body to a spot just in front of Desmond's hands.

"Just tell me if you want me to stop. Promise me you'll tell me."

"I swear." To himself, Thomas swears not to ask Desmond to stop. Not to want him to stop. His fear won't make him turn away this strange gift Desmond wants to give him.

The magic moves on him again, as lightly and gently as any touch Thomas has ever felt, but different. The tendrils are endlessly flexible; they curve round his wrists and spiral up his legs, explore the folds of his ears, pulse and thicken and thin. They even wrap, as fine as thread, around his nipples.

He's still afraid, but he's beginning to be aroused, too. When something brushes his lips, he opens his mouth and lets it in. The sensation isn't like a kiss, nor quite like fellatio, but has the flex and movement and solidity of both combined. He sucks at the end of the thing--Herrick's vine, the tentacle of an amorous octopus--and the almost-familiarity washes away more of his fear.

It's extraordinary, being touched in so many places at once. Orgies must be like this, a surrender to overwhelming sensation. But this isn't a room full of strangers, this is Desmond, this is the extreme of carnality and the extreme of tenderness at the same time. Thomas feels his body finally relax into the all-encompassing embrace Desmond has created for him.

The strangeness has gone out of it, but not the wonder. It's too much to comprehend, and with a fading bit of rationality he's impressed by Desmond's intricate control. His thighs are encircled, lifted, his penis and testicles and nipples and mouth toyed with, and his toes and fingers and ears, his ankles, the backs of his knees, his navel, and finally the last place, where a thin tendril slips into him, licking and pressing at him from inside until he's breathless with pleasure, then thickening to fill him, moving and sliding as orgasm builds in him like water in a dam until he overflows.

Everything for a while is very far away, though he distantly feels Desmond's arms come around him and hears his own contented sigh. He returns to awareness almost more conscious of Desmond's body than his own, which is still thrumming and almost literally aglow. He kisses the nearest bit, Desmond's chin, and says, "You astonishing man."

"Mmm." Complicated magic is exhausting, and Desmond came to the hotel straight away after his duty shift ended. He'll be asleep before long, and so far this has been very one-sided. Thomas slides hurriedly down the bed, kissing as he goes, and uses his mouth to bring Desmond to orgasm while Desmond is still conscious enough to notice. It seems a pretty feeble return for what Desmond made him feel. Later, if there is a later, and Thomas is going to have to learn to live with ifs, he can give Desmond something better. 

"I love you," Thomas says. Desmond's reply disappears into a slow, sleeping exhalation. Luckily he's off duty until tomorrow morning; he can sleep here all night, and he's a sound enough sleeper that he won't wake when Thomas has to leave.

Thomas slides his arm under Desmond's neck and his leg over Desmond's knee. If he knew how, he would wrap Desmond in magic and hold him completely. If he knew how, and if his conscience would allow it, he'd hide them both away on the dark side of the moon, two hundred thousand miles from secret projects and Lancaster bombers.

"Be safe," Thomas whispers, to Desmond, to any protective force that might be listening. "Be safe and come back to me."


End file.
